October 21, 2018

Era Before AFM - Superstitution Dominated Polio Epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s

There was no online WebMD.

As yet, the masses hadn't begun to become college-educated. So they were unable to think in a scientific manner about the causes of diseases. That was very different from the current analysis of acute flaccid myelitis - AFM - in Scientific American.

Everywhere, from the elite boarding school the late newspaper editor Ben Bradlee attended to the hood where I grew up, the severe after effects of polio were obvious.

So, no surprise, superstition ran wild among parents in the 1940s and 1950s, concerned their children would develop polio.

The brand of voodoo had been primitive. It reconfigured summertime, when most cases seemed to develop, from funtime to a spreading list of restrictions.

Don't go into a public pool, and you will be safe. Eventually not many public pools opened in those brutal summers before air-conditioning became standard. In the hood the "they" turned on the hydrants.

Stay indoors from noon to three P.M. when the heat was the worst.

Don't run.

Despite those precautions, when school reopened there would be tales of classmates who had "caught" polio. Most we would never see again. They were "being treated." In St. Boniface Roman Catholic parish school in downtown Jersey City, New Jersey, for a few weeks the nuns would lead us in prayer. Then that would be that.

Those who did return to the classroom, usually with a limp or even mobility contraptions, became grassroots celebrities. For those of us who craved attention, polio seemed a blessing. We hoped that we might become lucky next summer and also become stars.

Then one day we were told to go to the nurse's office for the Salk vaccine.

The collective consciousness shifted to how we would prepare to get into and succeed in college.

That was a whole different type of angst, but also permeated with superstition. Few of our parents had gone to college. The terror was more horrific than that which hung over the polio epidemics.

The next rounds of voodoo for baby boomers were all the guidance inflicted on us about our white-collar careers by a new industry: the advice experts. Do this. Never do that.

For most of us those spells cast in our youth and middle age have only be broken by the wild professional ride we have been on in a global economy driven by digital.

Any of us who didn't get it that we have to think for ourselves - and in a harsh capitalistic way - aren't working any more. Not working, just like polio, can be crippling. In America, the headquarters for capitalism, we are what we do to earn income. I actually tell off anyone who mandates I comply with the standard tribal beliefs about success and failure.

The journey from the 1940s and 1950s to the 21st century could have been fun. But, as during the polio epidemics, that had been snatched away, at least for those who passively accepted what the self-appointed witch doctors were foisting on a new generation.

Reflection: Currently the witch doctors take the form of financial services pros who warn us that anything less than $5 million socked away for the days of semi-retirement or retirement will render us homeless.

Attention is the currency of the 21st century. Jane Genova helps you get it for products, services, points of view, causes, branding, careers after-50, and college admission.